Institution

Current Position

Highest Degree

Online Media

People’s judgments and decisions profoundly influence experiences and outcomes in everyday life. How do time and attention affect emotional experience? How do immediate emotions influence charitable donations? How does egocentrism influence political polarization? My lab has examined questions such as these by using experimental methods to understand how people judge—and sometimes misjudge—themselves and the social world. We focus on two tracks of psychological processes that manifest in everyday social contexts: the interrelation of time, emotion and attention; and egocentric empathy gaps.

Time, Emotion, and Attention

Objects to which people’s immediate attention is directed loom large in emotional experience. This simple idea is the foundation of two research questions in my lab. First, how do people’s immediate emotions influence perception of distant emotions? We have shown that people underestimate how much emotional situations influence their own behavior in the “heat of the moment” (Andrade & Van Boven, 2010; Van Boven, Loewenstein, Welch, & Dunning, 2012). And because immediate emotional objects attract and hold attention, people perceive their immediate emotions as more emotionally intense than past emotions (Van Boven, White, & Huber, 2009) and than other people’s emotions (White & Van Boven, 2012). This immediacy bias in emotion perception is partially because merely directing attention to objects increases their emotional significance (NSF Grant 0552120). Importantly, many of these emotional effects can be mitigated by guiding people to be more reflective when rendering judgments and making decisions in contexts such as charitable donations and policy evaluations (NSF Grant 1124486).

Second, how does immediate experience affect psychological distance? Because people are oriented to cope with significant objects as they move through time and space, people attend more to the future than to the past (Kane, Van Boven, & McGraw, 2012; Van Boven, Kane, & McGraw, 2008). This future orientation contributes to greater emotional arousal when thinking about the future than the past (Van Boven & Ashworth, 2007). And because emotional arousal reduces psychological distance (Van Boven, Kane, McGraw, & Dale, 2010), the future is psychologically closer than the past (Caruso, Van Boven, Chin, & Ward, 2013). Understanding these relations between temporal perspective, emotion, and psychological distance can further understanding of common psychological disorders such as depression, anxiety, and addiction—instances where such processes go awry—and suggest interventions to treat those disorders.

Egocentrism and Empathy Gaps

Making good decisions in social contexts requires judgments about how other people respond to different situations. People develop mental models of the social world (Van Boven & Thompson, 2003), just as they develop mental models of physical systems (Oskarsson, Van Boven, Hastie, & McClelland, 2009). People’s mental models of others’ psychological processes are highly self-referential, shaped by introspection and personal experiences (Van Boven, Kamada, & Gilovich, 1999; Van Boven, White, Kamada, & Gilovich, 2003).

We have developed a dual judgment model of emotional perspective taking (Van Boven & Loewenstein, 2005a, 2005b; Van Boven, Loewenstein, Dunning, & Norgren, 2013). People estimate others’ reactions to emotional situations by judging how they would personally respond to those situations, using self-judgments as an anchor for judging other people (Epley, Keysar, Van Boven, & Gilovich, 2004). Because people tend to underestimate the impact of emotional situations on themselves, as described above, the dual judgment model implies that people similarly underestimate the impact of emotional situations on other people. These “empathy gaps” in self-perception therefore cause empathy gaps in social perception. We have demonstrated empathy gaps in emotional perspective taking regarding regarding bodily drives (Van Boven & Loewenstein, 2003), social anxiety (Van Boven, Loewenstein, & Dunning, 2005), and ownership—a context where empathy gaps are economically costly and resistant to change ( (Van Boven, Dunning, & Loewenstein, 2000; Van Boven, Loewenstein, & Dunning, 2003).

The dual judgment model of emotional perspective taking also helps explain why people’s own experience “contaminates” their judgments of how others’ perceive the social world. For example, people egocentrically to overestimate their ability to convey desired social identities (Van Boven, Krueger, Savitsky, & Gilovich, 2000), to overestimate their communication of preferences in negotiations (Van Boven, Gilovich, & Medvec, 2003), and overestimate how much credit they deserve for collaborative tasks (Savitsky, Van Boven, Epley, & Wight, 2005).

Consumer behavior is one particularly important context. We have shown that people are made happier by spending on life experiences rather than material possessions (Van Boven, 2005; Van Boven & Gilovich, 2003; Van Boven & Johnson Graham, 2007). Spending on life experiences can also foster positive social relationships. Consumers often manage their public consumption to maximize impression management (Chan, Berger, & Van Boven, 2012), and investing in life experiences portrays people in a more positive light than spending on material possessions (Van Boven, Campbell, & Gilovich, 2010).

Political polarization and the evaluation of public policy is another important context that my lab has focused on. We have examined how emotion and egocentrism cause people to misperceive others’ political attitudes (Van Boven, 2000), and to overestimate political polarization (Judd, Van Boven, Huber, & Nunes, 2012; Van Boven, Sherman, & Judd, 2012; NSF Grant 1049125). We have particularly focused on how exaggerated polarization in contexts of environmental policies, and how the misperception of partisan conflict among everyday people may pose a barrier to enacting policies to address climate change.

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Primary Interests:

Emotion, Mood, Affect

Judgment and Decision Making

Life Satisfaction, Well-Being

Person Perception

Political Psychology

Self and Identity

Social Cognition

Research Group or Laboratory:

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